County Connection

The entire Pinellas county government management team showed up at our last Friday Morning Group meeting. Well, OK, not exactly. However, we were joined by our old friend, Michele Tuegel from the Pinellas County Cultural Affairs Department. Michelle brought us copies of the slick new newsletter she has been working on. It was just over a year ago that the Pinellas Arts Council became a department in the county government with its new name - the Pinellas County Cultural Affairs Department. Thus this newsletter was Michelle's first collaboration with the County Communications Department. It was just about this time that Marcia Crawley, Pinellas County's Communication Director walked in to join us. Now Michelle and Marcia swear they didn't plan this, but I dunno...

Actually, it was a real treat to have Marcia join us. She has been active at The Studio@620 and has been wanting to be able to join us for some time. But that drive to Clearwater kept getting in the way.

Michelle also brought us news of a Cultural Tourism Workshop to be held in conjunction with the Convention and Visitors Bureau on February 8th. The workshop will focus on helping arts organizations better market themselves. The workshop will be held at the Collaborative Labs at the EpiCenter on 58th Street and Ulmerton. For more on county art happenings, be sure to check out the Cultural Affairs Departments' retooled website.

Another topic discussed last Friday was affordable live /work space for artists. The St. Petersburg City Council has placed a new emphasis on affordable housing this year with the creation of a Housing Services Committee. A committee meeting last Thursday impressed upon me that there is funding available from state and federal sources to assist in providing affordable housing. So why not try to have some of that money spent on affordable live / work space for artists? Peter Kageyama had gotten me some information on just such a project he is working on in Michigan, The Armory Arts Project. This is a very interesting adaptive reuse of an old National Guard Armory providing live / work space and a large gallery display space for artists.

Michelle Tuegel told us about something being worked on closer to home in Tallahassee. The Art on Gaines project there just received a $350,000 grant from Artspace , a Minneapolis based non profit whose mission is

to create, foster and preserve affordable space for artists and arts organizations.

The Tallahassee Democrat reported last week that

Arts on Gaines is envisioned as a mixed-use development where artists live, work and hold exhibits; where organizations and businesses devoted to the arts share space and ideas, an incubator for arts-related commerce and creativity; and where an eclectic collection of restaurants and retail stores serves a bustling clientele.

A model of neighborhood revitalization.

Just the sort of vision we could use around here. If we want to keep the arts buzz going in St. Petersburg, we are going to have to keep innovating. Standing still only gets you farther behind in the end.


Speaking of vision, Kudos to the artists of the former Gallery Royale for contributing equipment (lighting & such) to the burned down IMAAGO Art Gallery's reserection efforts.

A Rose By Any Other Name

I had a very pleasant surprise last Friday morning. My good friend Tom Orr came down from Tarpon Springs to join us at the Friday Morning Group. That was a pleasant enough surprise in itself. But Tom had brought his good friend Rose Sperling along as well. Rose is a very talented sculptor who is currently living in Fort Pierce. We are (I am) trying very hard to get Rose to move to St. Pete. Can't we all do something to encourage her?

We had a wide ranging discussion this past Friday. We talked about the Roser Park Art Festival that was held the weekend before. We also talked about the new Saturday Art Market to be held in Williams Park starting on December 1st. For more information about that, contact Leslie Curran at Interior Motives, 1110 Central.

The Studio@620 was also a topic of discussion. Seems they are having a juried show in February and the deadline for submissions is January 8th. We also talked about the current show The Water is Wide - the Art of Boat Building which opened last week. I am really looking forward to getting over there to see that.

We also talked about Al Lang Field again. The Rays announcement of their plans to build a new major league stadium on the site certainly puts the decision not to zone the site as parkland into a new light. There are still many questions to be answered, but the site has been the traditional home of a ball park, so I am certainly open to the idea.

Talk of ballparks led us to an unusual historical discussion of artists ties to this area. We talked about the Rolling Stones performance in Jack Russel Stadium in Clearwater which led to the composition of Satisfaction at the Jack Tar Harrison Hotel. Clearwater led to talk of Jim Morrison's ties to this area as well as Jack Kerouac's. And to top it all off, I had heard on NPR on the way in that last Friday was the anniversary of Janis Joplin's arrest at Curtis Hixon Hall in Tampa for using profanity on stage.

That woulda never happened in St. Pete.